This article argues that the legal profession has failed to effectively recognize and address violent misogyny as it occurs within the profession. It lays out a roadmap for the American Bar Association (“ABA”) and state bar associations across the country to follow in order to more successfully address this problem.

The article begins by exploring a high-profile incident of violence within the legal profession—the violence Roy Den Hollander committed against United States District Court Judge Salas’s family, as well as his killing of another attorney. It asks why this has not been treated as not only a crime against a member of the federal judiciary and her family, but as a gender-coded crime of violence. The article then argues that in the wake of this violence and other incidents like it, the ABA and state bar associations across the country must do three things as a first step in preventing a similar failure in the profession’s self-regulation from recurring. First, they must recognize the Den Hollander killings for what they were: gender-motivated killings that followed this particular perpetrator’s long history of gender-based discrimination and gender-based threats. Second, they must publish ethics opinions emphasizing that his actions, and actions like them, are violations of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct—specifically, Model Rules 8.4(b) and 8.4(g)—and that lawyers who engage in such behavior will be subject to the disciplinary process. Moreover, these opinions must include clarifications that his actions, and actions like them, are serious violations of the professional rules, subject to the mandatory reporting requirements of Model Rule 8.3. Third, the article argues for a larger reckoning: It asserts that the profession and its members must explicitly grapple with the reality that violence against judges is not the only problem Den Hollander’s actions brought to light, and in doing so we must assess and develop strategies to counter gender-based violence and misogyny in the legal profession.

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